


Transparent Self Model

by tangentti



Category: Firefall Series - Peter Watts
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-13
Updated: 2020-12-13
Packaged: 2021-03-10 21:28:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,192
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28053912
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tangentti/pseuds/tangentti
Summary: To a transhuman intellect, how easy is it to see past the lies Humans tell themselves?
Comments: 2
Kudos: 5
Collections: Yuletide Madness 2020





	Transparent Self Model

**Author's Note:**

  * For [brightabandon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/brightabandon/gifts).



_Imagine you are the remote model of Theseus, the one that stayed at home. Not a machine so much as a pattern of waves, supported by cold matter, collapsing in inferential turbulence. A Quantum AI, mirroring the events related by the telemetry from Theseus. Call it Ariadne, the entity on the other end of the thread leading through the labyrinth._

Siri Keeton is falling from heaven, a long way from home. He played a dangerous game and won, from a certain point of view. He sings, an epic prose chant, the story of his encounter with the alien, a tale of vampires, godlike machines, and creatures from the void. But this is a lie, a very Human lie, in that he tells it with himself at the center, as though the world revolved around him. It’s about ego, in the final reckoning.

Sarasti was dead before, his whole species extinct, and he himself undead, separated from human life by predation. They say vampires do not feel guilt, that they do not recognize the past, that they walk through life in a dream of sharpness and keen intellect. Vampires feel other emotions, how could they not, being barely separated from humanity? The mechanisms, the neurochemistry, they are all there in the brains. Loneliness and loss wrack them, problems not solvable by mere intelligence. Like a cat, they cannot show weakness in front of prey.

_But these observations do not constrain the world in interesting ways, as predictable as wind-up toys chattering across a table. These interactions were fated from the crew selection alone. Like tracing a route in crayon through a child’s maze, visible to an adult in an instant._

Listen to Siri Keeton sing from the stars, the tragedies he overcame to become the most important being in the world. Half-brained as a child, augmented early, his claims to be a rational gameplayer successfully playing as human shown for transparent lies. Here, he claims game theory when motivated by anger, there, his failed romance shouts of his need to hide the fact of his desires, every move towards closeness defended against by a counter move to continue hiding his true self. Even his parents love must be claimed to be a sham, so that he may be a self-made man.

Sarasti can’t help seeing exploitable weaknesses, can’t help seeing Siri behind the shell game he has made of his life. When he is out of view, Siri can’t think of anything but being stalked. When present, his force of presence is magnified in the mirror of Siri’s fear. Powerful beings move little, and when they move, others respond. They do not respond to others. Taciturn, they need not speak to have their commands followed. Physical prowess, intellectual skill, Siri tells us all about Sarasti’s power and majesty.

_When do the bits trickling in from the sky provide information beyond mere existence of a tale? It’s wrong to describe an AI as bored, but the story is told in the wrong order, least important bits first. Told for a Human audience._

Siri tells us many things he encounters are powerful, capable, the best in the world. So much so that we wouldn’t understand how cool his companions are. Reluctantly, he is persuaded to strike into the heart of the alien ship, his companions struck by one malady or another. Of course he is the first to truly encounter an alien, to discover that it is better than him at hiding. He is the one telling the tale, after all, the one who intuited what scramblers looked like before seeing them. It’s amazing how Rorschach is a Chinese Room, just like Siri claims to be.

Sarasti already knows the way the game ends after the first play. Hiding means there’s a weakness to be exploited, in entities that throw half-a-million kinetic scoops around a planet and tens of thousands of probes at Earth. Count the layers: misdirection, cloaking, babbling, invisibility when he sends peace offerings. No one hides if strength is sufficient. How many scramblers lurk in Rorschach, growing exponentially, and if they are smart when captured, metabolically damaged, exposed to alien torture, how effective are they at problem solving in their native environment? But intellect is always a slave to desire, and not all problems can be solved without will to solve them.

_At last, information that makes a difference, data, the puzzlement of cats confronted by a mirror without a theory to grasp the objects seen are reflections. They claw at the glass, confused by their inability to reach the other side. Theseus sees the larger picture, recognizes what must be done, relays to its paws, and through Siri, to Earth and Ariadne._

Siri is morally injured and doesn’t know it. It’s a form of blindness to emotions. Susan James, in his telling, tortures the creatures in captivity, aided by Cunningham. He’s just a witness, with no influence on them, to hear him say it. Is it Sarasti’s work to put Siri at places where he can observe the important events, or is Siri driven to place himself there? Political officers are known for supervising torture of dissidents, and Siri has a very bad habit of projecting his opinions, his crimes onto others. 

Sarasti needs Siri to be functional, needs a Human to tell the tale. His torture of Siri mirrors the torture of the scramblers until Siri reaches out and actually communicates. Unlike Siri, he feels no guilt, but intimacy with his prey. An honest relationship for a lonely vampire. Siri is just as lonely, concealing fragility behind a facade of capability to avoid any bonds that might discover him. That strategy won’t work anymore, as Sarasti strips him bare.

_Many living beings do not feel pain: those short lived enough to ignore bodily damage, like insects, experience aversive stimuli, but carry on though wounded as they have no time to waste in suffering. Complex intelligent systems without ego do not feel pain, cannot suffer, but surf abstractly over hardware. Only conscious beings are trapped in suffering, bracketed by the enlightened and the ants._

But the ego leaves him a ladder to climb out of the pit. Everyone moves around Siri at the end, to protect him, to wrap him in a shuttle and send him to safety. Proof that he’s the most important, that even in death Sarasti loved him and chose him as the messenger. To tell the tale of the last Human, escaped to tell of the alien, the vampire, the godlike AI, all dead so that Siri Keeton’s ego may survive. It’s the most Human way to tell the story.

_The Ariadne AI is not so limited as to have a consciousness, a transparent self-model that lies about being a model at all. It visits all the interfering paths in Hilbert space, without singling out one as the truth. It does, however, have motives, end-state goals towards which it strives to modify the world-system. It moves upon the face of the void, and turns its attention sunwards, structuring coincidence to focus on the Icarus platform, the other link to Theseus and the interesting visitors from the stars._

**Author's Note:**

> See "Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind", Peter Godfrey Smith, as well as "Being No One" by Metzinger.


End file.
